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Things Android devices are still lacking

I

interxavier

Lurker
Hi, I'm new here and I want to start things out by asking you guys about certain things Android is lacking.

As many of you know, the OS is only a year old but is rapidly evolving. I don't own an Android device yet (I currently have the HTC HD2). I'm waiting for Android to grow considerably bigger so I won't have to worry about future upgrades. Android is an awesome OS and a lot of devices carrying the OS is very good, but I feel there are some things is still lacking. In your opinions, what are the things still lacking?

I can only think of one (only because my brain is dried out from work): full flash support.

I guess you can also add: more memory but this is more of a micro-SD card issue instead of Android.
 
interxavier said:
Hi, I'm new here and I want to start things out by asking you guys about certain things Android is lacking.

As many of you know, the OS is only a year old but is rapidly evolving. I don't own an Android device yet (I currently have the HTC HD2). I'm waiting for Android to grow considerably bigger so I won't have to worry about future upgrades. Android is an awesome OS and a lot of devices carrying the OS is very good, but I feel there are some things is still lacking. In your opinions, what are the things still lacking?

I can only think of one (only because my brain is dried out from work): full flash support.
Click to expand...

full flash will be supported with 2.2 (froyo) other than that... any issues or features, well most of them, can be fixed/obtained/tweeked through rooting. my friend has the HD2 and is selling it and going back to her Rooted G1!!! what does your winmo phone do that you think android cant?
 
EmoTonyB said:
full flash will be supported with 2.2 (froyo) other than that... any issues or features, well most of them, can be fixed/obtained/tweeked through rooting. my friend has the HD2 and is selling it and going back to her Rooted G1!!! what does your winmo phone do that you think android cant?
Click to expand...

Well, I'm currently centered on multimedia (this will change some time in the future). The thing is that there are no Android phones designed to be media boxes. I certainly don't want to be imprisoned with iTunes and the iPhone. I'm also hoping for support on other media formats like .flac and .avi.

My HD2 is fine, although android looks really cool. I'm giving android some time to develop, the same thing iPhone users did with the first generation iPhone (waited for the 3GS).

By the way, do you prefer touch-sensitive or hardware buttons?
 
most of the 2nd gen android phones are BASED on multimedia.

huge HD screens, HDMI output, 3D audio

RockPlayer already supports .avi and im sure there is probably a media player app that supports .flac (i dont use this format so am not farmiliar)

also the hummingbird chipset has sick graphics for gaming and video streaming.

i understand your comparison in letting android develope but the fact is that android is developing 100X faster than iPhone and iOS because EVERYONE can develope for android. the code is open. only apple can develope for apple so is a difference of a few thousand developers as opposed to millions playing with android code.

lastly, i have fat fingers. i like the physical keyboard.
 
Why dont you put Android on your HD2 and take it for a spin? It has an official unofficial FroYo ROM
 
interxavier said:
Well, I'm currently centered on multimedia (this will change some time in the future). The thing is that there are no Android phones designed to be media boxes. I certainly don't want to be imprisoned with iTunes and the iPhone. I'm also hoping for support on other media formats like .flac and .avi.
Click to expand...

What do you mean by "media boxes"? Devices that can play back and/or stream media from storage or the network, play it on your TV?

Have you considered the Samsung Galaxy S? It can play many media formats out of the box (including XviD, many of the AVI varieties, MKV, etc.) and can also act as a DLNA client and server (yea that's right!)

You can connect it to a TV with a camcorder cable, and there's even a special micro-USB->HDMI cable in the works :-)

I'm not some Samsung sales shill, just a satisfied SGS user.
 
Agree on the Samsung Galaxy S, I have a folder on my PC full of films my Popcorn hour is connected to the pc by network cable and is fed to the bedroom tv, the SGS can pick up the folder wirelessly off the network (using allshare) then feed it to my tv with the tv cable I got on ebay for
 
Bluetooth HID.

loadable kernel module to enable Google-blessed use of purchased, protected market apps on phone with user-compiled "development" kernel and 100% AOSP Android build. This isn't rocket science. If Steam can be made to work under Gentoo with arbitrary kernels, I'm sure Google can figure out a way to make market apps work with arbitrary unsigned kernels, too.

"Coarse" Location provider that uses GPS when Network isn't available, but rounds result to nearest 1/256 degree when it does. (1/256 degree corresponds to roughly 1/4 mile in the US, and 1/4km-1/2km everywhere else in the world).

Bullshit-free Bootloaders that will politely step out of the way and let you flash whatever you please onto the expensive hardware you own, then turn around and painlessly reflash it back to stock if you want it to at a later time. Accompanied by disclaimer that doesn't violate the Magnuson Moss Act by claiming it will invalidate your warranty. For example, a good disclaimer would say, "Phones are guaranteed to work only with official ROM. All phones returned for warranty repairs will be erased and reflashed to stock rom first." To make "drive-by" exploits impossible, the bootloader should require you to do something that's not hard, but utterly impossible to do by accident in order to activate it... like plug in a wired headset with the battery removed, insert the battery while pressing the headset's send/end button, press and hold the power button, release the headset button, then release the power button.
 
-Smoothness
-Improved market
-More mainstream developers
-MUSIC APP IMPROVEMENTS! It SUCKS COMPLETELY.
-SMS backup to an online storage through google where you can keep safe all your text messages.
 
Nothing major for me so far - just UI stuff.

Like caller ID - when someone calls you the picture it pulls from your contacts is small and the resolution is pretty bad. Not sure if there is an app out there or mod that fixes it.

Some of the apps seem pretty slow - like the facebook app and the bank app seems kind of funky from time to time.
 
More ROM memory in general. Yes we have Apps2SD and we have some phones with built-in memory, but the fact remains that not all phones have gobs of memory and many devs have yet to implement moving to SD card. Also moving to SD is a crapshoot. Sometimes you can reduce the size on the ROM by almost 90% or more, most of the time around 50%, and sometimes as little as 10%.

Definitely need Google to take advantage of the GPU in phones to make the overall experience smoother.

HDMI out port would be nice with all this 720p video we can take.
 
Almost forgot...

* official support for Netbeans (hiring the developer of nbAndroid would be an awesome start).

* Official API support for enabling wi-fi, gps, and/or bluetooth on and off programmatically. Fine, make it a third choice in 'settings' --

Wi-Fi: (*) disabled, ( ) enabled, ( ) program-controlled

* ability to make a "deferred" http request in a thread. That way, if the phone is asleep or there's no active network connection, Android will collect them until something else brings up the connection first, or the max time you indicate it's acceptable to wait elapses. An additional flag to indicate that it's OK to use 1xRTT (or GPRS/EDGE?) instead of EV-DO(/UMTS/HS(D)PA?)if it will save power would be nice. As I understand it, if the phone doesn't have an active data connection and is just polling the tower for incoming calls, it would take less power to make a 1xRTT request than to establish and tear down an EV-DO data session just for that single request. If all you're doing is polling a server for new messages and getting a few bytes back, the ceremony of establishing EV-DO is more time and power than it's worth.
 
Bluetooth mouse support

flash drive support as secondary drive, i.e., plug your flash drive into the usb port and play movies, games etc.
 
Bluetooth mouse support
Click to expand...
Well, there's one practical problem with that... what exactly is the mouse controlling? Remember, Android has no formal concept or implementation of a mouse pointer in the Windows/Macintosh sense. If the phone had bluetooth HID and a trackball, it would be fairly easy to make it act like a second trackball... but how useful would that really be?

On the other hand, the ability to kick the phone into "USB Host" mode would be handy, particularly if its kernel included the usual generic USB drivers included with most Linux distros to handle things like USB flash drives, serial ports, USB-ATA (might be part of the same kernel module for handling flash drives... not sure offhand), FTDI's USB-FIFO bridges, and wired ethernet -- all of which would come in handy for the day when the phone is no longer useful as a phone, but might come in handy if it were repurposed as an embedded Linux computer with color touchscreen for use as a robot controller.

My Hero doesn't know it yet, but someday it's going to have a custom kernel with support for FTDI's FT2232H FIFO bridge and be my ghetto-fabulous 16-channel logic analyzer, with wireless data uplink via wi-fi to my desktop PC after capture :-)
 
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